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E DI TO R ’ S L E T T E R
Think global, live Italian. This is a summary of the publishing project which you have today in your hands. No one now can disregard a global view, for this reason we think that Italy can still represent an internationally unique style and a cultural model of consumption to which anyone can aspire. Ours is a country with great resources which is not always able to work in an integrated way; therefore, in the fragmented national scene, it seemed natural for the largest culture Company of the country to take charge to find ways, channels and language to promote the country and its talents with authority.
Italiana is a project of Rai Com, the new trading company of Rai Group, which was formed specifically in order to enhance and promote the intellectual property rights of RAI worldwide and which can carry out its task to the extent that it will be able to communicate the excellence of the protagonists of this country. Italiana seemed to us, in its simplicity, the best name to be able to summarise the passion for excellence of the Italians. All disciplines to which we have always devoted our talents come in its pages (life, beauty, passion, creativity, imagination and soul). A magazine which aims to show a contemporary picture and awareness of Italy without tiresome smugness. Italiana, therefore, is the catalogue of the beauty and excellence of our country which is aimed towards those who love Italy, to foreigners who look to our country as a reference point for at least one of the many subjects in which we excel, to the Italians who honour it every day as citizens, before as professionals, but most of all it is dedicated to the protagonists of our excellence so that they do not feel alone anymore, but rather, the cutting edge of a country finally aware of itself. Italiana, therefore, wants to be an open window on a new perspective of creative Italy which will be made available periodically at no cost to the Italian and foreign professionals of Media, Tourism, Culture, Fashion and Institutions. Italiana, in its printed version, is only the first step in a cross-media project that will continue to evolve and improve with the contribution of all those who, inside and outside the Company, intend to raise the desire for Italy that has always conquered the world! Luigi De Siervo
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V I TA I TA L I A N A
What if Dante had had a Xd-Cam movie camera in his hand? And if Giambattista Vico had been able to use a webcam? If Vincenzo Gioberti or Manzoni had enjoyed digital editing? If Guicciardini or Machiavelli had had gigabytes of photo and video storage on hand? They would likely have recounted Italy and Italians differently from how they did. They would have in fact had a mountain of data and feedback available to them that was unthinkable for their time. Recounting a nation, as we know, is no easy matter. And recounting a country that is as complex, alive, layered, and parochial as ours – a nation where, rightly or wrongly, Count D’Azeglio said that Italians were “Italy’s worst enemies – can become a tangle so unsolvable as to become an impossible enterprise, or an act of hubris. Normally, there are two professional categories – let us call them that – that take-charge of this task: statisticians and sociologists on the one hand, and writers on the other. On the one hand, what prevails is the objectivity of data, the weighted analysis of factors, the factual analysis of figures that is translated into numbers, percentages, and statistical categories. In Italy, for example, it is ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) or Censis (Centre for social investment studies) that do jobs of this kind. There are also countless analyses devoted to investigating the quality of Italian civic culture, or the presence of “social capital” in the territories. These are highly precious working tools, because, in providing a photograph of tastes, consumption, income, and styles, they explain what Italians are today, perhaps by investigating the changes that took place with respect to the past. Writers, on the other hand – with this category also including journalists and their investigative work – choose the subjective profile, the nuance, the play in depth, the ability to get to the bottom in analyzing a phenomenon or a feeling. These two worlds rarely dialogue, and unfortunately opportunities for confrontation are quite rare. On the other hand, precisely to dig down into the deep sense of national belonging and Italian cultural
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there is the deep breathing of a nation in the film’s sequences, in the stories it knits togheter
identity, this work of dialogue between scholars and writers should be fostered and enhanced, especially in a moment of crisis like the current one, when – to cite a piece from The New York Times from several years ago – we Italians are floating in the “winter of our discontent” and in a sort of collective sentiment that leaves truly little room for an optimistic projection of what we expect in the future. Basically, understanding the Italians, and recounting them, is not just an act aimed at “cultivating and communicating collective memory” (Giovanni Bechelloni). It also means an act of individual growth, a broader and deeper sense provided by our individual existences as Italics, citizens in the world rooted within an extraordinary and stratospheric cultural tradition. All in order to comprehend today what “Italianness” is and how it is manifested in lifestyle, in forma mentis, in aptitudes, in behaviours, in the sedimentations of thought, in the vision of the world. Even more fascinating is – would be – the converse suggestion: directly asking Italians to recount themselves. If a gigantic narrative database could be created, we would have a collective novel, a mosaic in which each tessera consists of the voice, the face, and the words of our countryman. At this level, ISTAT’s investigations are useful, but are not enough, because the objective snapshot of our country – which provides us with macro numbers on what we are at the level of statistical indicators – by the necessity
of things annihilates the sediment of individuality, indispensable for understanding what scholars define as subjectivity. For this reason, the experiment of the film Italy in a Day (which I imagined as a sort of “click-day” of our narrative imagination), arising precisely from the simple request of Italians to speak of themselves through images, has an extraordinary value in terms of learning and photographing our collective well- or ill-being. Thus “Made in Italy” has become “Made by Italians.” One of the main characters – one of the hundreds of characters – in the film by Gabriele Salvatores is right: who knows what those who, in hundreds of years, will watch and in fact admire what his ancestors in the Bel Paese were like, will feel when they see this film. There is the deep breathing of a nation in the film’s sequences, in the stories it brings together and intertwines in the desire to transform so many small, individual stories into a collective canticle. A nation where one lives, goes around, prays, and loves in pursuit of uncertainty, and where, however, our age-old fatalism does not always make way for its closest manifestation: resignation. The small miracle achieved by the film is that, on this journey of Italians and among the Italians, over the 24 hours each of us, even someone who has not chosen to take part in this enormous enterprise, can recognize himself. If there had to be or if there could exist a collective novel written not by authors but directly by its protagonists, Italians now possess it.
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